You don't need luck, luck needs you

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

• Seneca (disputed)

Often someone will describe success as requiring a collection of abilities including, but not limited to: determination, dedication, an open mind, structure, healthy habits, practice, focus, etc. But what seemingly always get’s included is “a little luck”.
I find this a bit annoying.

Luck is a given. To the point where it’s redundant. You’re lucky to even be here in the first place. I myself owe my existence (in large part) to a coin toss.

In the late 1980’s, a young Australian writer was travelling through Greece and boarded a ferry with the intention of visiting Naxos. She went up deck, spotting a man whom she asked to hold one of her bags, while she went back downstairs to get the other. The man came from a small town in Germany, and was on a work trip, conducting seminars in Jazz drumming and rhythm. Once back up, and after some time conversing, the man asked if she would come with him to Paros. The lady, being an excited companion to the twists and turns of life, tossed a coin. Heads for Paros, tails for Naxos. As luck would have it, it landed on heads. And so I’m here today writing this post, and for the sake of a nice story, can report my parents are happily together to this day, and that my mum still has the coin.

I’m by no means suggesting that being born is your best shot at success. That’s called privilege, the dark shadow of luck. Instead, I’m wanting to point out that luck is so pervasive, so integral to life, that it’s redundant to include it as a pre-requisite for success. In other words, luck is an inherit consequence of being spawn of this universe. Every day we play the game of chance.

So, forget about your endeavours needing to depend on luck. Instead, rid your mind of the worry and get busy, so that when luck does reveal itself, you can seize it. Naturally, luck can deliver unexpected ease to a goal. But it’s not predictable, nor is it controllable. It’s therefore a waste of time and energy to worry about “good” or “bad” luck coming your way. Ever heard someone comment on a past happening as a “blessing in disguise?“. Luck is then a question. Can you recognise it when it comes your way, and will you be prepared when it does?

In Wired to Create, Kaufman and Gregoire recount how opportunity and preparedness forged a crystalline unit of luck, sending Albert Hofman on a bike ride he would never forget.

In his 1983 memoir LSD: My Problem Child, Hofman wrote, “I could not forget the relatively uninteresting LSD-25”, “A peculiar presentiment…induced me, five years after the first synthesis, to produce LSD-25 once again so that a sample could be given to the pharmacological department for further tests.”¹

In the final stages of crystallizing the sample that would be sent to the department, the smallest of doses dropped on his hand, making him feel a bit strange and go home sick. This case of chance piqued his curiosity and on April 19, 1943 Hofmann ingested an “infinitesimal dose” of LSD and while riding home on his bike from the lab, experienced the first acid trip ever.

“In the realm of scientific observation, luck is granted only to those who are prepared” - Louis Pasteur

You don’t need luck, luck needs you.